sudden activity by Mrs. Tucker's white and rigid face. "It's the frozen
truth, and I kin prove it. For I kin swear that when that there young
woman was sailin' outer the Golden Gate, Spencer Tucker was in my
bar-room; I kin swear that I fed him, lickered him, give him a hoss and
set him in his road to Monterey that very night."
"Then, where is he now?" said Mrs. Tucker, suddenly facing them.
They looked at each other, and then looked at Mrs. Tucker. Then both
together replied slowly and in perfect unison,
"That's--what--we--want--to--know." They seemed so satisfied with this
effect that they as deliberately repeated,
"Yes--that's--what--we--want--to--know."
Between the shock of meeting the partner of her husband's guilt and the
unexpected revelation to her inexperience, that in suggestion and
appearance there was nothing beyond the recollection of that guilt that
was really shocking in the woman--between the extravagant extremes of
hope and fear suggested by their words, there was something so
grotesquely absurd in the melodramatic chorus that she with difficulty
suppressed an hysterical laugh.
"That's the way to take it," said the woman, putting her own
good-humored interpretation upon Mrs. Tucker's expression. "Now, look
here! I'll tell you all about it," She carefully selected the most
comfortable chair, and sitting down, lightly crossed her hands in her
lap. "Well, I left here on the 13th of last January on the ship Argo,
calculating that your husband would join the ship just inside the
Heads. That was our arrangement, but if anything happened to prevent
him, he was to join me at Acapulco. Well! he didn't come aboard, and we
sailed without him. But it appears now he did attempt to join the ship,
but his boat was capsized. There now, don't be alarmed! he wasn't
drowned, as Patterson can swear to--no, catch _him_! not a hair of him
was hurt. But _I_--_I_ was bundled off to the end of the earth in
Mexico alone, without a cent to bless me. For true as you live, that
hound of a captain, when he found, as he thought, that Spencer was
nabbed, he just confiscated all his trunks and valuables and left me in
the lurch. If I had not met a man down there that offered to marry me
and brought me here, I might have died there, I reckon. But I did, and
here I am. I went down there as your husband's sweetheart, I've come
back as the wife of an honest man, and I reckon it's about square!"
There was something so startlingly frank, so hopelessly self-satisfied,
so contagiously good-humored in the woman's perfect moral
unconsciousness, that even if Mrs. Tucker had been less preoccupied her
resentment would have abated. But her eyes were fixed on the gloomy
face of Patterson, who was beginning to unlock the sepulchers of his
memory and disinter his deeply buried thoughts.
"You kin bet your whole pile on what this Mrs. Capting Baxter--ez used
to be French Inez of New Orleans--hez told ye. Ye kin take everything
she's onloaded. And it's only doin' the square thing to her to say, she
hain't done it out o' no cussedness, but just to satisfy herself, now
she's a married woman and past such foolishness. But that ain't neither
here nor there. The gist of the whole matter is that Spencer Tucker was
at the _tienda_ the day after she sailed and after his boat capsized."
He then gave a detailed account of the interview, with the unnecessary
but truthful minutiae of his class, adding to the particulars already
known that the following week he visited the Summit House and was
surprised to find that Spencer had never been there, nor had he ever
sailed from Monterey.
"But why was this not told to me before?" said Mrs. Tucker, suddenly.
"Why not at the time? Why," she demanded almost fiercely, turning from
the one to the other, "has this been kept from me?"
"I'll tell ye why," said Patterson, sinking with crashed submission
into a chair. "When I found he wasn't where he ought to be, I got to
lookin' elsewhere. I knew the track of the hoss I lent him by a loose
shoe. I examined, and found he had turned off the highroad somewhere
beyond the lagoon, jist as if he was makin' a bee line here."
"Well," said Mrs. Tucker breathlessly.
"Well," said Patterson, with the resigned tone of an accustomed martyr,
"mebbe I'm a God-forsaken idiot, but I reckon he _did_ come yer. And
mebbe I'm that much of a habitooal lunatic, but thinking so, I
calkilated you'd know it without tellin'."
With their eyes fixed upon her, Mrs. Tucker felt the quick blood rush
to her cheeks, although she knew not why. But they were apparently
satisfied with her ignorance, for Patterson resumed, yet more gloomily:
"Then if he wasn't hidin' here beknownst to you, he must have changed
his mind agin and got away by the _embarcadero_. The only thing wantin'
to prove that idea is to know how he got a boat, and what he did with
the hoss. And thar's one more idea, and ez that can't be proved,"
continued Patterson, sinking his voice still lower, "mebbe it's
accordin' to God's laws."
Unsympathetic to her as the speaker had always been and still was, Mrs.
Tucker felt a vague chill creep over her that seemed to be the result
of his manner more than his words. "And that idea is--?" she suggested
with pale lips.
"It's this! Fust, I don't say it means much to anybody but me. I've
heard of these warnings afore now, ez comin' only to folks ez hear them
for themselves alone, and I reckon I kin stand it, if it's the will o'
God. The idea is then--that--Spencer Tucker--_was drownded_ in that
boat; the idea is"--his voice was almost lost in a hoarse
whisper--"that it was no living man that kem to me that night, but a
spirit that kem out of the darkness and went back into it! No eye saw
him but mine--no ears heard him but mine. I reckon it weren't intended
it should." He paused, and passed the flap of his hat across his eyes.
"The pie, you'll say, is agin it," he continued in the same tone of
voice,--"the whiskey is agin it--a few cuss words that dropped from
him, accidental like, may have been agin it. All the same they mout
have been only the little signs and tokens that it was him."
But Mrs. Baxter's ready laugh somewhat rudely dispelled the infection
of Patterson's gloom. "I reckon the only spirit was that which you and
Spencer consumed," she said, cheerfully. "I don't wonder you're a
little mixed. Like as not you've misunderstood his plans."
Patterson shook his head. "He'll turn up yet, alive and kicking! Like
as not, then, Poindexter knows where he is all the time."
"Impossible! He would have told me," said Mrs. Tucker, quickly.
Mrs. Baxter looked at Patterson without speaking. Patterson replied by
a long lugubrious whistle.
"I don't understand you," said Mrs. Tucker, drawing back with cold
dignity.
"You don't?" returned Mrs. Baxter. "Bless your innocent heart! Why was
he so keen to hunt me up at first, shadowing my friends and all that,
and why has he dropped it now he knows I'm here, if he didn't know
where Spencer was?"
"I can explain that," interrupted Mrs. Tucker, hastily, with a blush of
confusion. "That is--I"--
"Then mebbe you kin explain too," broke in Patterson with gloomy
significance, "why he has bought up most of Spencer's debts himself,
and perhaps you're satisfied it _is n't_ to hold the whip hand of him
and keep him from coming back openly. Pr'aps you know why he's movin'
heaven and earth to make Don José Santierra sell the ranch, and why the
Don don't see it all."
"Don José sell Los Cuervos! Buy it, you mean?" said Mrs. Tucker. "_I_
offered to sell it to him."
Patterson arose from the chair, looked despairingly around him, passed
his hand sadly across his forehead, and said: "It's come! I knew it
would. It's the warning! It's suthing betwixt jim-jams and doddering
idjiocy. Here I'd hev been willin' to swear that Mrs. Baxter here told
me _she_ had sold this yer ranch nearly two years ago to Don José, and
now you"--
"Stop!" said Mrs. Tucker, in a voice that chilled them.
She was standing upright and rigid, as if stricken to stone. "I command
you to tell me what this means!" she said, turning only her blazing
eyes upon the woman.
Even the ready smile faded from Mrs. Baxter's lips as she replied
hesitatingly and submissively: "I thought you knew already that Spencer
had given this ranch to me. I sold it to Don José to get the money for
us to go away with. It was Spencer's idea"--
"You lie!" said Mrs. Tucker.
There was a dead silence. The wrathful blood that had quickly mounted
to Mrs. Baxter's cheek, to Patterson's additional bewilderment, faded
as quickly. She did not lift her eyes again to Mrs. Tucker's, but,
slowly raising herself from her seat, said, "I wish to God I did lie;
but it's true. And it's true that I never touched a cent of the money,
but gave it all to him!" She laid her hand on Patterson's arm, and
said, "Come! let us go," and led him a few steps toward the gateway.
But here Patterson paused, and again passed his hand over his
melancholy brow. The necessity of coherently and logically closing the
conversation impressed itself upon his darkening mind. "Then you don't
happen to have heard anything of Spencer?" he said sadly, and vanished
with Mrs. Baxter through the gate.
Left alone to herself, Mrs. Tucker raised her hands above her head with
a little cry, interlocked her rigid fingers, and slowly brought her
palms down upon her upturned face and eyes, pressing hard as if to
crush out all light and sense of life before her. She stood thus for a
moment motionless and silent, with the rising wind whispering without
and flecking her white morning dress with gusty shadows from the arbor.
Then, with closed eyes, dropping her hands to her breast, still
pressing hard, she slowly passed them down the shapely contours of her
figure to the waist, and with another cry cast them off as if she were
stripping herself of some loathsome garment. Then she walked quickly to
the gateway, looked out, returned to the corridor, unloosening and
taking off her wedding-ring from her finger as she walked. Here she
paused, then slowly and deliberately rearranged the chairs and adjusted
the gay-colored rugs that draped them, and quietly reëntered her
chamber.
Two days afterwards the sweating steed of Captain Poindexter was turned
loose in the corral, and a moment later the captain entered the
corridor. Handing a letter to the decrepit Concha, who seemed to be
utterly disorganized by its contents and the few curt words with which
it was delivered, he gazed silently upon the vacant bower, still fresh
and redolent with the delicacy and perfume of its graceful occupant,
until his dark eyes filled with unaccustomed moisture. But his reverie
was interrupted by the sound of jingling spurs without, and the old
humor struggled back into his eyes as Don José impetuously entered. The
Spaniard started back, but instantly recovered himself.
"So, I find you here. Ah! it is well!" he said passionately, producing
a letter from his bosom. "Look! Do you call this honor? Look how you
keep your compact!"
Poindexter coolly took the letter. It contained a few words of gentle
dignity from Mrs. Tucker, informing Don José that she had only that
instant learned of his just claims upon Los Cuervos, tendering him her
gratitude for his delicate intentions, but pointing out with respectful
firmness that he must know that a moment's further acceptance of his
courtesy was impossible.
"She has gained this knowledge from no word of mine," said Poindexter,
calmly. "Right or wrong, I have kept my promise to you. I have as much
reason to accuse you of betraying my secret in this," he added coldly,
as he took another letter from his pocket and handed it to Don José.
It seemed briefer and colder, but was neither. It reminded Poindexter
that as he had again deceived her she must take the government of her
affairs in her own hands henceforth. She abandoned all the furniture
and improvements she had put in Los Cuervos to him, to whom she now
knew she was indebted for them. She could not thank him for what his
habitual generosity impelled him to do for any woman, but she could
forgive him for misunderstanding her like any other woman, perhaps she
should say, like a child. When he received this she would be already on
her way to her old home in Kentucky, where she still hoped to be able
by her own efforts to amass enough to discharge her obligations to him.
"She does not speak of her husband, this woman," said Don José,
scanning Poindexter's face. "It is possible she rejoins him, eh?"
"Perhaps in one way she has never left him, Don José," said Poindexter,
with grave significance.
Don José's face flushed, but he returned carelessly, "And the _rancho_,
naturally you will not buy it now?"
"On the contrary, I shall abide by my offer," said Poindexter, quietly.
Don José eyed him narrowly, and then said, "Ah, we shall consider of
it."
He did consider it, and accepted the offer. With the full control of
the land, Captain Poindexter's improvements, so indefinitely postponed,
were actively pushed forward. The thick walls of the _hacienda_ were
the first to melt away before them; the low lines of corral were
effaced, and the early breath of the summer trade winds swept
uninterruptedly across the now leveled plain to the _embarcadero_,
where a newer structure arose. A more vivid green alone marked the spot
where the crumbling adobe walls of the _casa_ had returned to the
parent soil that gave it. The channel was deepened, the lagoon was
drained, until one evening the magic mirror that had so long reflected
the weary waiting of the Blue Grass Penelope lay dull, dead,
lusterless, an opaque quagmire of noisome corruption and decay to be
put away from the sight of man forever. On this spot the crows, the
titular tenants of Los Cuervos, assembled in tumultuous congress,
coming and going in mysterious clouds, or laboring in thick and
writhing masses, as if they were continuing the work of improvement
begun by human agency. So well had they done the work that by the end
of a week only a few scattered white objects remained glittering on the
surface of the quickly drying soil. But they were the bones of the
missing outcast, Spencer Tucker!
The same spring a breath of war swept over a foul, decaying quagmire of
the whole land, before which such passing deeds as these were blown as
vapor. It called men of all rank and condition to battle for a nation's
life, and among the first to respond were those into whose boyish hands
had been placed the nation's honor. It returned the epaulets to
Poindexter's shoulder with the addition of a double star, carried him
triumphantly to the front, and left him, at the end of a summer's day
and a hard-won fight, sorely wounded, at the door of a Blue Grass
farmhouse. And the woman who sought him out and ministered to his wants
said timidly, as she left her hand in his, "I told you I should live to
repay you."
LEFT OUT ON LONE STAR MOUNTAIN.
I.
There was little doubt that the Lone Star claim was "played out." Not
dug out, worked out, washed out, but _played_ out. For two years its
five sanguine proprietors had gone through the various stages of mining
enthusiasm; had prospected and planned, dug and doubted. They had
borrowed money with hearty but unredeeming frankness, established a
credit with unselfish abnegation of all responsibility, and had borne
the disappointment of their creditors with a cheerful resignation which
only the consciousness of some deep Compensating Future could give.
Giving little else, however, a singular dissatisfaction obtained with
the traders, and, being accompanied with a reluctance to make further
advances, at last touched the gentle stoicism of the proprietors
themselves. The youthful enthusiasm which had at first lifted the most
ineffectual trial, the most useless essay, to the plane of actual
achievement, died out, leaving them only the dull, prosaic record of
half-finished ditches, purposeless shafts, untenable pits, abandoned
engines, and meaningless disruptions of the soil upon the Lone Star
claim, and empty flour sacks and pork barrels in the Lone Star cabin.
They had borne their poverty, if that term could be applied to a light
renunciation of all superfluities in food, dress, or ornament,
ameliorated by the gentle depredations already alluded to, with
unassuming levity. More than that: having segregated themselves from
their fellow-miners of Red Gulch, and entered upon the possession of
the little manzanita-thicketed valley five miles away, the failure of
their enterprise had assumed in their eyes only the vague significance
of the decline and fall of a general community, and to that extent
relieved them of individual responsibility. It was easier for them to
admit that the Lone Star claim was "played out" than confess to a
personal bankruptcy. Moreover, they still retained the sacred right of
criticism of government, and rose superior in their private opinions to
their own collective wisdom. Each one experienced a grateful sense of
the entire responsibility of the other four in the fate of their
enterprise.
On December 24, 1863, a gentle rain was still falling over the length
and breadth of the Lone Star claim. It had been falling for several
days, had already called a faint spring color to the wan landscape,
repairing with tender touches the ravages wrought by the proprietors,
or charitably covering their faults. The ragged seams in gulch and
cañon lost their harsh outlines, a thin green mantle faintly clothed
the torn and abraded hillside. A few weeks more, and a veil of
forgetfulness would be drawn over the feeble failures of the Lone Star
claim. The charming derelicts themselves, listening to the raindrops on
the roof of their little cabin, gazed philosophically from the open
door, and accepted the prospect as a moral discharge from their
obligations. Four of the five partners were present. The Right and Left
Bowers, Union Mills, and the Judge.
It is scarcely necessary to say that not one of these titles was the
genuine name of its possessor. The Right and Left Bowers were two
brothers; their sobriquets, a cheerful adaptation from the favorite
game of euchre, expressing their relative value in the camp. The mere
fact that Union Mills had at one time patched his trousers with an old
flour-sack legibly bearing that brand of its fabrication, was a
tempting baptismal suggestion that the other partners could not forego.
The Judge, a singularly inequitable Missourian, with no knowledge
whatever of the law, was an inspiration of gratuitous irony.
Union Mills, who had been for some time sitting placidly on the
threshold with one leg exposed to the rain, from a sheer indolent
inability to change his position, finally withdrew that weather-beaten
member, and stood up. The movement more or less deranged the attitudes
of the other partners, and was received with cynical disfavor. It was
somewhat remarkable that, although generally giving the appearance of
healthy youth and perfect physical condition, they one and all
simulated the decrepitude of age and invalidism, and after limping
about for a few moments, settled back again upon their bunks and stools
in their former positions. The Left Bower lazily replaced a bandage
that he had worn around his ankle for weeks without any apparent
necessity, and the Judge scrutinized with tender solicitude the faded
cicatrix of a scratch upon his arm. A passive hypochondria, born of
their isolation, was the last ludicrously pathetic touch of their
situation.
The immediate cause of this commotion felt the necessity of an
explanation.
"It would have been just as easy for you to have stayed outside with
your business leg, instead of dragging it into private life in that
obtrusive way," retorted the Right Bower; "but that exhaustive effort
is n't going to fill the pork barrel. The grocery man at Dalton
says--what's that he said?" he appealed lazily to the Judge.
"Said he reckoned the Lone Star was about played out, and he didn't
want any more in his--thank you!" repeated the Judge with a mechanical
effort of memory utterly devoid of personal or present interest.
"I always suspected that man, after Grimshaw begun to deal with him,"
said the Left Bower. "They're just mean enough to join hands against
us." It was a fixed belief of the Lone Star partners that they were
pursued by personal enmities.
"More than likely those new strangers over in the Fork have been paying
cash and filled him up with conceit," said Union Mills, trying to dry
his leg by alternately beating it or rubbing it against the cabin wall.
"Once begin wrong with that kind of snipe and you drag everybody down
with you."
This vague conclusion was received with dead silence. Everybody had
become interested in the speaker's peculiar method of drying his leg,
to the exclusion of the previous topic. A few offered criticism, no one
assistance.
"Who did the grocery man say that to?" asked the Right Bower, finally
returning to the question.
"The Old Man," answered the Judge.
"Of course," ejaculated the Right Bower sarcastically.
"Of course," echoed the other partners together. "That's like him. The
Old Man all over!"
It did not appear exactly what was like the Old Man, or why it was like
him, but generally that he alone was responsible for the grocery man's
defection. It was put more concisely by Union Mills.
"That comes of letting him go there! It's just a fair provocation to
any man to have the Old Man sent to him. They can't, sorter, restrain
themselves at him. He's enough to spoil the credit of the Rothschilds."
"That's so," chimed in the Judge. "And look at his prospecting. Why, he
was out two nights last week, all night, prospecting in the moonlight
for blind leads, just out of sheer foolishness."
"It was quite enough for me," broke in the Left Bower, "when the other
day, you remember when, he proposed to us white men to settle down to
plain ground sluicing, making 'grub' wages just like any Chinaman. It
just showed his idea of the Lone Star claim."
"Well, I never said it afore," added Union Mills, "but when that one of
the Mattison boys came over here to examine the claim with an eye to
purchasin', it was the Old Man that took the conceit out of him. He
just as good as admitted that a lot of work had got to be done afore
any pay ore could be realized. Never even asked him over to the shanty
here to jine us in a friendly game; just kept him, so to speak, to
himself. And naturally the Mattisons didn't see it."
A silence followed, broken only by the rain monotonously falling on the
roof, and occasionally through the broad adobe chimney, where it
provoked a retaliating hiss and splutter from the dying embers of the
hearth. The Right Bower, with a sudden access of energy, drew the empty
barrel before him, and taking a pack of well-worn cards from his
pocket, began to make a "solitaire" upon the lid. The others gazed at
him with languid interest.
"Makin' it for anythin'?" asked Mills.
The Right Bower nodded.
The Judge and Left Bower, who were partly lying in their respective
bunks, sat up to get a better view of the game. Union Mills slowly
disengaged himself from the wall and leaned over the "solitaire"
player. The Right Bower turned the last card in a pause of almost
thrilling suspense, and clapped it down on the lid with fateful
emphasis.
"It went!" said the Judge in a voice of hushed respect. "What did you
make it for?" he almost whispered.
"To know if we'd make the break we talked about and vamose the ranch.
It's the _fifth_ time to-day," continued the Right Bower in a voice of
gloomy significance. "And it went agin bad cards too."
"I ain't superstitious," said the Judge, with awe and fatuity beaming
from every line of his credulous face, "but it's flyin' in the face of
Providence to go agin such signs as that."
"Make it again, to see if the Old Man must go," suggested the Left
Bower.
The suggestion was received with favor, the three men gathering
breathlessly around the player. Again the fateful cards were shuffled
deliberately, placed in their mysterious combination, with the same
ominous result. Yet everybody seemed to breathe more freely, as if
relieved from some responsibility, the Judge accepting this manifest
expression of Providence with resigned self-righteousness.
"Yes, gentlemen," resumed the Left Bower, serenely, as if a calm legal
decision had just been recorded, "we must not let any foolishness or
sentiment get mixed up with this thing, but look at it like business
men. The only sensible move is to get up and get out of the camp."
"And the Old Man?" queried the Judge.
"The Old Man--hush! he's coming."
The doorway was darkened by a slight lissome shadow. It was the absent
partner, otherwise known as "the Old Man." Need it be added that he was
a _boy_ of nineteen, with a slight down just clothing his upper lip!
"The creek is up over the ford, and I had to 'shin' up a willow on the
bank and swing myself across," he said, with a quick, frank laugh; "but
all the same, boys, it's going to clear up in about an hour, you bet.
It's breaking away over Bald Mountain, and there's a sun flash on a bit
of snow on Lone Peak. Look! you can see it from here. It's for all the
world like Noah's dove just landed on Mount Ararat. It's a good omen."
From sheer force of habit the men had momentarily brightened up at the
Old Man's entrance. But the unblushing exhibition of degrading
superstition shown in the last sentence recalled their just severity.
They exchanged meaning glances. Union Mills uttered hopelessly to
himself: "Hell's full of such omens."
Too occupied with his subject to notice this ominous reception, the Old
Man continued: "I reckon I struck a fresh lead in the new grocery man
at the Crossing. He says he'll let the Judge have a pair of boots on
credit, but he can't send them over here; and considering that the
Judge has got to try them anyway, it don't seem to be asking too much
for the Judge to go over there. He says he'll give us a barrel of pork
and a bag of flour if we'll give him the right of using our tail-race
and clean out the lower end of it."
"It's the work of a Chinaman, and a four days' job," broke in the Left
Bower.
"It took one white man only two hours to clean out a third of it,"
retorted the Old Man triumphantly, "for _I_ pitched in at once with a
pick he let me have on credit, and did that amount of work this
morning, and told him the rest of you boys would finish it this
afternoon."
A slight gesture from the Right Bower checked an angry exclamation from
the Left. The Old Man did not notice either, but, knitting his smooth
young brow in a paternally reflective fashion, went on: "You'll have to
get a new pair of trousers, Mills, but as he doesn't keep clothing,
we'll have to get some canvas and cut you out a pair. I traded off the
beans he let me have for some tobacco for the Right Bower at the other
shop, and got them to throw in a new pack of cards. These are about
played out. We'll be wanting some brushwood for the fire; there's a
heap in the hollow. Who's going to bring it in? It's the Judge's turn,
isn't it? Why, what's the matter with you all?"
The restraint and evident uneasiness of his companions had at last
touched him. He turned his frank young eyes upon them; they glanced
helplessly at each other. Yet his first concern was for them, his first
instinct paternal and protecting. He ran his eyes quickly over them;
they were all there and apparently in their usual condition. "Anything
wrong with the claim?" he suggested.
Without looking at him the Right Bower rose, leaned against the open
door with his hands behind him and his face towards the landscape, and
said, apparently to the distant prospect: "The claim's played out, the
partnership's played out, and the sooner we skedaddle out of this the
better. If," he added, turning to the Old Man, "if _you_ want to stay,
if you want to do Chinaman's work at Chinaman's wages, if you want to
hang on to the charity of the traders at the Crossing, you can do it,
and enjoy the prospects and the Noah's doves alone. But we're
calculatin' to step out of it."
"But I haven't said I wanted to do it _alone_" protested the Old Man
with a gesture of bewilderment.
"If these are your general ideas of the partnership," continued the
Right Bower, clinging to the established hypothesis of the other
partners for support, "it ain't ours, and the only way we can prove it
is to stop the foolishness right here. We calculated to dissolve the
partnership and strike out for ourselves elsewhere. You're no longer
responsible for us, nor we for you. And we reckon it's the square thing
to leave you the claim and the cabin and all it contains. To prevent
any trouble with the traders, we've drawn up a paper here"--
"With a bonus of fifty thousand dollars each down, and the rest to be
settled on my children," interrupted the Old Man, with a half uneasy
laugh. "Of course. But"--he stopped suddenly, the blood dropped from
his fresh cheek, and he again glanced quickly round the group. "I don't
think--I--I quite _sabe_, boys," he added, with a slight tremor of
voice and lip. "If it's a conundrum, ask me an easier one."
Any lingering doubt he might have had of their meaning was dispelled by
the Judge. "It's about the softest thing you kin drop into, Old Man,"
he said confidentially; "if _I_ had n't promised the other boys to go
with them, and if I did n't need the best medical advice in Sacramento
for my lungs, I'd just enjoy staying with you."
"It gives a sorter freedom to a young fellow like you, Old Man, like
goin' into the world on your own capital, that every Californian boy
has n't got," said Union Mills, patronizingly.
"Of course it's rather hard papers on us, you know, givin' up
everything, so to speak; but it's for your good, and we ain't goin'
back on you," said the Left Bower, "are we, boys?"
The color had returned to the Old Man's face a little more quickly and
freely than usual. He picked up the hat he had cast down, put it on
carefully over his brown curls, drew the flap down on the side towards
his companions, and put his hands in his pockets. "All right," he said,
in a slightly altered voice. "When do you go?"
"To-day," answered the Left Bower. "We calculate to take a moonlight
_pasear_ over to the Cross Roads and meet the down stage at about
twelve to-night. There's plenty of time yet," he added, with a slight
laugh; "it's only three o'clock now."
There was a dead silence. Even the rain withheld its continuous patter,
a dumb, gray film covered the ashes of the hushed hearth. For the first
time the Right Bower exhibited some slight embarrassment.
"I reckon it's held up for a spell," he said, ostentatiously examining
the weather, "and we might as well take a run round the claim to see if
we've forgotten nothing. Of course, we'll be back again," he added
hastily, without looking at the Old Man, "before we go, you know."
The others began to look for their hats, but so awkwardly and with such
evident preoccupation of mind that it was not at first discovered that
the Judge had his already on. This raised a laugh, as did also a clumsy
stumble of Union Mills against the pork barrel, although that gentleman
took refuge from his confusion and secured a decent retreat by a gross
exaggeration of his lameness, as he limped after the Right Bower. The
Judge whistled feebly. The Left Bower, in a more ambitious effort to
impart a certain gayety to his exit, stopped on the threshold and said,
as if in arch confidence to his companions, "Darned if the Old Man
don't look two inches higher since he became a proprietor," laughed
patronizingly, and vanished.
If the newly-made proprietor had increased in stature, he had not
otherwise changed his demeanor. He remained in the same attitude until
the last figure disappeared behind the fringe of buckeye that hid the
distant highway. Then he walked slowly to the fireplace, and, leaning
against the chimney, kicked the dying embers together with his foot.
Something dropped and spattered in the film of hot ashes. Surely the
rain had not yet ceased!
His high color had already fled except for a spot on either cheekbone
that lent a brightness to his eyes. He glanced around the cabin. It
looked familiar and yet strange. Rather, it looked strange _because_
still familiar, and therefore incongruous with the new atmosphere that
surrounded it--discordant with the echo of their last meeting, and
painfully accenting the change. There were the four "bunks," or
sleeping berths, of his companions, each still bearing some traces of
the individuality of its late occupant with a dumb loyalty that seemed
to make their light-hearted defection monstrous. In the dead ashes of
the Judge's pipe, scattered on his shelf, still lived his old fire; in
the whittled and carved edges of the Left Bower's bunk still were the
memories of bygone days of delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes
clustered round a knot of one of the beams there was still the record
of the Right Bower's old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings
of female loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of
their old extravagant devotion--all a mute protest to the change.
He remembered how, a fatherless, truant schoolboy, he had drifted into
their adventurous, nomadic life, itself a life of grown-up truancy like
his own, and became one of that gypsy family. How they had taken the
place of relations and household in his boyish fancy, filling it with
the unsubstantial pageantry of a child's play at grown-up existence, he
knew only too well. But how, from being a pet and _protégé_, he had
gradually and unconsciously asserted his own individuality and taken
upon his younger shoulders not only a poet's keen appreciation of that
life, but its actual responsibilities and half-childish burdens, he
never suspected. He had fondly believed that he was a neophyte in their
ways, a novice in their charming faith and indolent creed, and they had
encouraged it; now their renunciation of that faith could only be an
excuse for a renunciation of _him_. The poetry that had for two years
invested the material and sometimes even mean details of their
existence was too much a part of himself to be lightly dispelled. The
lesson of those ingenuous moralists failed, as such lessons are apt to
fail; their discipline provoked but did not subdue; a rising
indignation, stirred by a sense of injury, mounted to his cheek and
eyes. It was slow to come, but was none the less violent that it had
been preceded by the benumbing shock of shame and pride.
I hope I shall not prejudice the reader's sympathies if my duty as a
simple chronicler compels me to state, therefore, that the sober second
thought of this gentle poet was to burn down the cabin on the spot with
all its contents. This yielded to a milder counsel--waiting for the
return of the party, challenging the Right Bower, a duel to the death,
perhaps himself the victim, with the crushing explanation _in
extremis_, "It seems we are _one_ too many. No matter; it is settled
now. Farewell!" Dimly remembering, however, that there was something of
this in the last well-worn novel they had read together, and that his
antagonist might recognize it, or even worse, anticipate it himself,
the idea was quickly rejected. Besides, the opportunity for an
apotheosis of self-sacrifice was past. Nothing remained now but to
refuse the proffered bribe of claim and cabin by letter, for he must
not wait their return. He tore a leaf from a blotted diary, begun and
abandoned long since, and essayed to write. Scrawl after scrawl was
torn up, until his fury had cooled down to a frigid third personality.
"Mr. John Ford regrets to inform his late partners that their tender of
house, of furniture," however, seemed too inconsistent with the
pork-barrel table he was writing on; a more eloquent renunciation of
their offer became frivolous and idiotic from a caricature of Union
Mills, label and all, that appeared suddenly on the other side of the
leaf; and when he at last indited a satisfactory and impassioned
exposition of his feelings, the legible _addendum_ of "Oh, ain't you
glad you're out of the wilderness!"--the forgotten first line of a
popular song, which no scratching would erase--seemed too like an
ironical postscript to be thought of for a moment. He threw aside his
pen and cast the discordant record of past foolish pastime into the
dead ashes of the hearth.
How quiet it was! With the cessation of the rain the wind too had gone
down, and scarcely a breath of air came through the open door. He
walked to the threshold and gazed on the hushed prospect. In this
listless attitude he was faintly conscious of a distant reverberation,
a mere phantom of sound--perhaps the explosion of a distant blast in
the hills--that left the silence more marked and oppressive. As he
turned again into the cabin a change seemed to have come over it. It
already looked old and decayed. The loneliness of years of desertion
seemed to have taken possession of it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in
the beams and rafters. To his excited fancy the few disordered blankets
and articles of clothing seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks
there was a hideous resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to
a withered and mummied corpse. So it might look in after-years when
some passing stranger--but he stopped. A dread of the place was
beginning to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the
monotonous sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the
long, long days of endless blue and cloudless, overhanging solitude;
summer days when the wearying, incessant trade winds should sing around
that empty shell and voice its desolation. He gathered together hastily
a few articles that were especially his own--rather that the free
communion of the camp, from indifference or accident, had left wholly
to him. He hesitated for a moment over his rifle, but, scrupulous in
his wounded pride, turned away and left the familiar weapon that in the
dark days had so often provided the dinner or breakfast of the little
household. Candor compels me to state that his equipment was not large
nor eminently practical. His scant pack was a light weight for even his
young shoulders, but I fear he thought more of getting away from the
Past than providing for the Future.
With this vague but sole purpose he left the cabin, and almost
mechanically turned his steps towards the creek he had crossed that
morning. He knew that by this route he would avoid meeting his
companions; its difficulties and circuitousness would exercise his
feverish limbs and give him time for reflection. He had determined to
leave the claim, but whence he had not yet considered. He reached the
bank of the creek where he had stood two hours before; it seemed to him
two years. He looked curiously at his reflection in one of the broad
pools of overflow, and fancied he looked older. He watched the rush and
outset of the turbid current hurrying to meet the South Fork, and to
eventually lose itself in the yellow Sacramento. Even in his
preoccupation he was impressed with a likeness to himself and his
companions in this flood that had burst its peaceful boundaries. In the
drifting fragments of one of their forgotten flumes washed from the
bank, he fancied he saw an omen of the disintegration and decay of the
Lone Star claim.
The strange hush in the air that he had noticed before--a calm so
inconsistent with that hour and the season as to seem
portentous--became more marked in contrast to the feverish rush of the
turbulent watercourse. A few clouds lazily huddled in the west
apparently had gone to rest with the sun on beds of somnolent poppies.
There was a gleam as of golden water everywhere along the horizon,
washing out the cold snow-peaks, and drowning even the rising moon. The
creek caught it here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear
their broken sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian
stream they had been hopefully created to direct and carry. But by some
peculiar trick of the atmosphere the perfect plenitude of that golden
sunset glory was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the
Lone Star Mountain. That isolated peak, the landmark of their claim,
the gaunt monument of their folly, transfigured in the evening
splendor, kept its radiance unquenched long after the glow had fallen
from the encompassing skies, and when at last the rising moon, step by
step, put out the fires along the winding valley and plains, and crept
up the bosky sides of the cañon, the vanishing sunset was lost only to
reappear as a golden crown.
The eyes of the young man were fixed upon it with more than a momentary
picturesque interest. It had been the favorite ground of his
prospecting exploits, its lowest flank had been scarred in the old
enthusiastic days with hydraulic engines, or pierced with shafts, but
its central position in the claim and its superior height had always
given it a commanding view of the extent of their valley and its
approaches, and it was this practical preeminence that alone attracted
him at that moment. He knew that from its crest he would be able to
distinguish the figures of his companions, as they crossed the valley
near the cabin, in the growing moonlight. Thus he could avoid
encountering them on his way to the highroad, and yet see them,
perhaps, for the last time. Even in his sense of injury there was a
strange satisfaction in the thought.
The ascent was toilsome, but familiar. All along the dim trail he was
accompanied by gentler memories of the past, that seemed, like the
faint odor of spiced leaves and fragrant grasses wet with the rain and
crushed beneath his ascending tread, to exhale the sweeter perfume in
his effort to subdue or rise above them. There was the thicket of
manzanita, where they had broken noonday bread together; here was the
rock beside their maiden shafts, where they had poured a wild libation
in boyish enthusiasm of success; and here the ledge where their first
flag, a red shirt heroically sacrificed, was displayed from a
long-handled shovel to the gaze of admirers below. When he at last
reached the summit, the mysterious hush was still in the air, as if in
breathless sympathy with his expedition. In the west, the plain was
faintly illuminated, but disclosed no moving figures. He turned towards
the rising moon, and moved slowly to the eastern edge. Suddenly he
stopped. Another step would have been his last! He stood upon the
crumbling edge of a precipice. A landslip had taken place on the
eastern flank, leaving the gaunt ribs and fleshless bones of Lone Star
Mountain bare in the moonlight. He understood now the strange rumble
and reverberation he had heard; he understood now the strange hush of
bird and beast in brake and thicket!
Although a single rapid glance convinced him that the slide had taken
place in an unfrequented part of the mountain, above an inaccessible
cañon, and reflection assured him his companions could not have reached
that distance when it took place, a feverish impulse led him to descend
a few rods in the track of the avalanche. The frequent recurrence of
outcrop and angle made this comparatively easy. Here he called aloud;
the feeble echo of his own voice seemed only a dull impertinence to the
significant silence. He turned to reascend; the furrowed flank of the
mountain before him lay full in the moonlight. To his excited fancy a
dozen luminous star-like points in the rocky crevices started into life
as he faced them. Throwing his arm over the ledge above him, he
supported himself for a moment by what appeared to be a projection of
the solid rock. It trembled slightly. As he raised himself to its
level, his heart stopped beating. It was simply a fragment detached
from the outcrop, lying loosely on the ledge but upholding him by _its
own weight only_. He examined it with trembling fingers; the
encumbering soil fell from its sides and left its smoothed and worn
protuberances glistening in the moonlight. It was virgin gold!
Looking back upon that moment afterwards, he remembered that he was not
dazed, dazzled, or startled. It did not come to him as a discovery or
an accident, a stroke of chance or a caprice of fortune. He saw it all
in that supreme moment; Nature had worked out their poor deduction.
What their feeble engines had essayed spasmodically and helplessly
against the curtain of soil that hid the treasure, the elements had
achieved with mightier but more patient forces. The slow sapping of the
winter rains had loosened the soil from the auriferous rock, even while
the swollen stream was carrying their impotent and shattered engines to
the sea. What mattered that his single arm could not lift the treasure
he had found; what mattered that to unfix those glittering stars would
still tax both skill and patience! The work was done, the goal was
reached! even his boyish impatience was content with that. He rose
slowly to his feet, unstrapped his long-handled shovel from his back,
secured it in the crevice, and quietly regained the summit.
It was all his own! His own by right of discovery under the law of the
land, and without accepting a favor from _them_. He recalled even the
fact that it was _his_ prospecting on the mountain that first suggested
the existence of gold in the outcrop and the use of the hydraulic. _He_
had never abandoned that belief, whatever the others had done. He dwelt
somewhat indignantly to himself on this circumstance, and half
unconsciously faced defiantly towards the plain below. But it was
sleeping peacefully in the full sight of the moon, without life or
motion. He looked at the stars, it was still far from midnight. His
companions had no doubt long since returned to the cabin to prepare for
their midnight journey. They were discussing him, perhaps laughing at
him, or worse, pitying him and his bargain. Yet here was his bargain! A
slight laugh he gave vent to here startled him a little, it sounded so
hard and so unmirthful, and so unlike, as he oddly fancied what he
really _thought_. But _what_ did he think?
Nothing mean or revengeful; no, they never would say _that_. When he
had taken out all the surface gold and put the mine in working order,
he would send them each a draft for a thousand dollars. Of course, if
they were ever ill or poor he would do more. One of the first, the very
first things he should do would be to send them each a handsome gun and
tell them that he only asked in return the old-fashioned rifle that
once was his. Looking back at the moment in after-years, he wondered
that, with this exception, he made no plans for his own future, or the
way he should dispose of his newly acquired wealth. This was the more
singular as it had been the custom of the five partners to lie awake at
night, audibly comparing with each other what they would do in case
they made a strike. He remembered how, Alnaschar-like, they nearly
separated once over a difference in the disposal of a hundred thousand
dollars that they never had, nor expected to have. He remembered how
Union Mills always began his career as a millionaire by a "square meal"
at Delmonico's; how the Right Bower's initial step was always a trip
home "to see his mother;" how the Left Bower would immediately placate
the parents of his beloved with priceless gifts (it may be
parenthetically remarked that the parents and the beloved one were as
hypothetical as the fortune); and how the Judge would make his first
start as a capitalist by breaking a certain faro bank in Sacramento. He
himself had been equally eloquent in extravagant fancy in those
penniless days, he who now was quite cold and impassive beside the more
extravagant reality.
How different it might have been! If they had only waited a day longer!
if they had only broken their resolves to him kindly and parted in good
will! How he would long ere this have rushed to greet them with the
joyful news! How they would have danced around it, sung themselves
hoarse, laughed down their enemies, and run up the flag triumphantly on
the summit of the Lone Star Mountain! How they would have crowned him
"the Old Man," "the hero of the camp!" How he would have told them the
whole story; how some strange instinct had impelled him to ascend the
summit, and how another step on that summit would have precipitated him
into the cañon! And how--but what if somebody else, Union Mills or the
Judge, had been the first discoverer? Might they not have meanly kept
the secret from him; have selfishly helped themselves and done--
"What _you_ are doing now."
The hot blood rushed to his cheek, as if a strange voice were at his
ear. For a moment he could not believe that it came from his own pale
lips until he found himself speaking. He rose to his feet, tingling
with shame, and began hurriedly to descend the mountain.
He would go to them, tell them of his discovery, let them give him his
share, and leave them forever. It was the only thing to be done,
strange that he had not thought of it at once. Yet it was hard, very
hard and cruel, to be forced to meet them again. What had he done to
suffer this mortification? For a moment he actually hated this vulgar
treasure that had forever buried under its gross ponderability the
light and careless past, and utterly crushed out the poetry of their
old, indolent, happy existence.
He was sure to find them waiting at the Cross Roads where the coach
came past. It was three miles away, yet he could get there in time if
he hastened. It was a wise and practical conclusion of his evening's
work, a lame and impotent conclusion to his evening's indignation.
No matter. They would perhaps at first think he had come to weakly
follow them, perhaps they would at first doubt his story. No matter. He
bit his lips to keep down the foolish rising tears, but still went
blindly forward.
He saw not the beautiful night, cradled in the dark hills, swathed in
luminous mists, and hushed in the awe of its own loveliness! Here and
there the moon had laid her calm face on lake and overflow, and gone to
sleep embracing them, until the whole plain seemed to be lifted into
infinite quiet. Walking on as in a dream, the black, impenetrable
barriers of skirting thickets opened and gave way to vague distances
that it appeared impossible to reach, dim vistas that seemed
unapproachable. Gradually he seemed himself to become a part of the
mysterious night. He was becoming as pulseless, as calm, as
passionless.
What was that? A shot in the direction of the cabin! yet so faint, so
echoless, so ineffective in the vast silence, that he would have
thought it his fancy but for the strange instinctive jar upon his
sensitive nerves. Was it an accident, or was it an intentional signal
to him? He stopped; it was not repeated, the silence reasserted itself,
but this time with an ominous deathlike suggestion. A sudden and
terrible thought crossed his mind. He cast aside his pack and all
encumbering weight, took a deep breath, lowered his head, and darted
like a deer in the direction of the challenge.
II.
The exodus of the seceding partners of the Lone Star claim had been
scarcely an imposing one. For the first five minutes after quitting the
cabin the procession was straggling and vagabond. Unwonted exertion had
exaggerated the lameness of some, and feebleness of moral purpose had
predisposed the others to obtrusive musical exhibition. Union Mills
limped and whistled with affected abstraction; the Judge whistled and
limped with affected earnestness. The Right Bower led the way with some
show of definite design; the Left Bower followed with his hands in his
pockets. The two feebler natures, drawn together in unconscious
sympathy, looked vaguely at each other for support.
"You see," said the Judge, suddenly, as if triumphantly concluding an
argument, "there ain't anything better for a young fellow than
independence. Nature, so to speak, points the way. Look at the
animals."
"There's a skunk hereabouts," said Union Mills, who was supposed to be
gifted with aristocratically sensitive nostrils, "within ten miles of
this place; like as not crossing the Ridge. It's always my luck to
happen out just at such times. I don't see the necessity anyhow of
trapesing round the claim now, if we calculate to leave it to-night."
Both men waited to observe if the suggestion was taken up by the Right
and Left Bower moodily plodding ahead. No response following, the Judge
shamelessly abandoned his companion.
"You wouldn't stand snoopin' round instead of lettin' the Old Man get
used to the idea alone? No; I could see all along that he was takin' it
in, takin' it in kindly but slowly, and I reckoned the best thing for
us to do was to git up and git until he'd got round it." The Judge's
voice was slightly raised for the benefit of the two before him.
"Didn't he say," remarked the Right Bower, stopping suddenly and facing
the others, "didn't he say that that new trader was goin' to let him
have some provisions anyway?"
Union Mills turned appealingly to the Judge; that gentleman was forced
to reply, "Yes; I remember distinctly he said it. It was one of the
things I was particular about on his account," responded the Judge,
with the air of having arranged it all himself with the new trader. "I
remember I was easier in my mind about it."
"But didn't he say," queried the Left Bower, also stopping short,
"suthin' about its being contingent on our doing some work on the
race?"
The Judge turned for support to Union Mills, who, however, under the
hollow pretense of preparing for a long conference, had luxuriously
seated himself on a stump. The Judge sat down also, and replied,
hesitatingly, "Well, yes! Us or him."
"Us or him," repeated the Right Bower, with gloomy irony. "And you
ain't quite clear in your mind, are you, if _you_ haven't done the work
already? You're just killing yourself with this spontaneous,
promiscuous, and premature overwork; that's what's the matter with
you."
"I reckon I heard somebody say suthin' about its being a Chinaman's
three-day job," interpolated the Left Bower, with equal irony, "but I
ain't quite clear in my mind about that."
"It'll be a sorter distraction for the Old Man," said Union Mills,
feebly,--"kinder take his mind off his loneliness."
Nobody taking the least notice of the remark, Union Mills stretched out
his legs more comfortably and took out his pipe. He had scarcely done
so when the Right Bower, wheeling suddenly, set off in the direction of
the creek. The Left Bower, after a slight pause, followed without a
word. The Judge, wisely conceiving it better to join the stronger
party, ran feebly after him, and left Union Mills to bring up a weak
and vacillating rear.
Their course, diverging from Lone Star Mountain, led them now directly
to the bend of the creek, the base of their old ineffectual operations.
Here was the beginning of the famous tail--race that skirted the new
trader's claim, and then lost its way in a swampy hollow. It was choked
with debris; a thin, yellow stream that once ran through it seemed to
have stopped work when they did, and gone into greenish liquidation.
They had scarcely spoken during this brief journey, and had received no
other explanation from the Right Bower, who led them, than that
afforded by his mute example when he reached the race. Leaping into it
without a word, he at once began to clear away the broken timbers and
drift-wood. Fired by the spectacle of what appeared to be a new and
utterly frivolous game, the men gayly leaped after him, and were soon
engaged in a fascinating struggle with the impeded race. The Judge
forgot his lameness in springing over a broken sluice-box; Union Mills
forgot his whistle in a happy imitation of a Chinese coolie's song.
Nevertheless, after ten minutes of this mild dissipation, the pastime
flagged; Union Mills was beginning to rub his leg, when a distant
rumble shook the earth. The men looked at each other; the diversion was
complete; a languid discussion of the probabilities of its being an
earthquake or a blast followed, in the midst of which the Right Bower,
who was working a little in advance of the others, uttered a warning
cry and leaped from the race. His companions had barely time to follow
before a sudden and inexplicable rise in the waters of the creek sent a
swift irruption of the flood through the race. In an instant its choked
and impeded channel was cleared, the race was free, and the scattered
debris of logs and timber floated upon its easy current. Quick to take
advantage of this labor-saving phenomenon, the Lone Star partners
sprang into the water, and by disentangling and directing the eddying
fragments completed their work.
"The Old Man oughter been here to see this," said the Left Bower; "it's
just one o' them climaxes of poetic justice he's always huntin' up.
It's easy to see what's happened. One o' them high-toned shrimps over
in the Excelsior claim has put a blast in too near the creek. He's
tumbled the bank into the creek and sent the back water down here just
to wash out our race. That's what I call poetical retribution."
"And who was it advised us to dam the creek below the race and make it
do the thing?" asked the Right Bower, moodily.
"That was one of the Old Man's ideas, I reckon," said the Left Bower,
dubiously.
"And you remember," broke in the Judge with animation, "I allus said,
'Go slow, go slow. You just hold on and suthin' will happen.' And," he
added, triumphantly, "you see suthin' _has_ happened. I don't want to
take credit to myself, but I reckoned on them Excelsior boys bein'
fools, and took the chances."
"And what if I happen to know that the Excelsior boys ain't blastin'
to-day?" said the Right Bower, sarcastically.
As the Judge had evidently based his hypothesis on the alleged fact of
a blast, he deftly evaded the point. "I ain't sayin' the Old Man's head
ain't level on some things; he wants a little more _sabe_ of the world.
He's improved a good deal in euchre lately, and in poker--well! he's
got that sorter dreamy, listenin'-to-the-angels kind o' way that you
can't exactly tell whether he's bluffin' or has got a full hand. Hasn't
he?" he asked, appealing to Union Mills.
But that gentleman, who had been watching the dark face of the Right
Bower, preferred to take what he believed to be his cue from him. "That
ain't the question," he said virtuously; "we ain't takin' this step to
make a card sharp out of him. We're not doin' Chinamen's work in this
race to-day for that. No, sir! We're teachin' him to paddle his own
canoe." Not finding the sympathetic response he looked for in the Right
Bower's face, he turned to the Left.
"I reckon we were teachin' him our canoe was too full," was the Left
Bower's unexpected reply. "That's about the size of it."
The Right Bower shot a rapid glance under his brows at his brother. The
latter, with his hands in his pockets, stared unconsciously at the
rushing water, and then quietly turned away. The Right Bower followed
him. "Are you goin' back on us?" he asked.
"Are _you_?" responded the other.
"No!"
"_No_, then it is," returned the Left Bower quietly. The elder brother
hesitated in half-angry embarrassment.
"Then what did you mean by saying we reckoned our canoe was too full?"
"Wasn't that our idea?" returned the Left Bower, indifferently.
Confounded by this practical expression of his own unformulated good
intentions, the Right Bower was staggered.
"Speakin' of the Old Man," broke in the Judge, with characteristic
infelicity, "I reckon he'll sort o' miss us, times like these. We were
allers runnin' him and bedevilin' him, after work, just to get him
excited and amusin', and he'll kinder miss that sort o' stimulatin'. I
reckon we'll miss it too, somewhat. Don't you remember, boys, the night
we put up that little sell on him and made him believe we'd struck it
rich in the bank of the creek, and got him so conceited, he wanted to
go off and settle all our debts at once?"
"And how I came bustin' into the cabin with a pan full of iron pyrites
and black sand," chuckled Union Mills, continuing the reminiscences,
"and how them big gray eyes of his nearly bulged out of his head. Well,
it's some satisfaction to know we did our duty by the young fellow even
in those little things." He turned for confirmation of their general
disinterestedness to the Right Bower, but he was already striding away,
uneasily conscious of the lazy following of the Left Bower, like a
laggard conscience at his back. This movement again threw Union Mills
and the Judge into feeble complicity in the rear, as the procession
slowly straggled homeward from the creek.
Night had fallen. Their way lay through the shadow of Lone Star
Mountain, deepened here and there by the slight, bosky ridges that,
starting from its base, crept across the plain like vast roots of its
swelling trunk. The shadows were growing blacker as the moon began to
assert itself over the rest of the valley, when the Right Bower halted
suddenly on one of these ridges. The Left Bower lounged up to him and
stopped also, while the two others came up and completed the group.
"There's no light in the shanty," said the Right Bower in a low voice,
half to himself and half in answer to their inquiring attitude. The men
followed the direction of his finger. In the distance the black outline
of the Lone Star cabin stood out distinctly in the illumined space.
There was the blank, sightless, external glitter of moonlight on its
two windows that seemed to reflect its dim vacancy, empty alike of
light and warmth and motion.
"That's sing'lar," said the Judge in an awed whisper.
The Left Bower, by simply altering the position of his hands in his
trousers' pockets, managed to suggest that he knew perfectly the
meaning of it, had always known it; but that being now, so to speak, in
the hands of Fate, he was callous to it. This much, at least, the elder
brother read in his attitude. But anxiety at that moment was the
controlling impulse of the Right Bower, as a certain superstitious
remorse was the instinct of the two others, and without heeding the
cynic, the three started at a rapid pace for the cabin.
They reached it silently, as the moon, now riding high in the heavens,
seemed to touch it with the tender grace and hushed repose of a tomb.
It was with something of this feeling that the Right Bower softly
pushed open the door; it was with something of this dread that the two
others lingered on the threshold, until the Right Bower, after vainly
trying to stir the dead embers on the hearth into life with his foot,
struck a match and lit their solitary candle. Its flickering light
revealed the familiar interior unchanged in aught but one thing. The
bunk that the Old Man had occupied was stripped of its blankets; the
few cheap ornaments and photographs were gone; the rude poverty of the
bare boards and scant pallet looked up at them unrelieved by the bright
face and gracious youth that had once made them tolerable. In the grim
irony of that exposure, their own penury was doubly conscious. The
little knapsack, the tea-cup and coffee-pot that had hung near his bed,
were gone also. The most indignant protest, the most pathetic of the
letters he had composed and rejected, whose torn fragments still
littered the floor, could never have spoken with the eloquence of this
empty space! The men exchanged no words; the solitude of the cabin,
instead of drawing them together, seemed to isolate each one in selfish
distrust of the others. Even the unthinking garrulity of Union Mills
and the Judge was checked. A moment later, when the Left Bower entered
the cabin, his presence was scarcely noticed.
The silence was broken by a joyous exclamation from the Judge. He had
discovered the Old Man's rifle in the corner, where it had been at
first overlooked. "He ain't gone yet, gentlemen--for yer's his rifle,"
he broke in, with a feverish return of volubility, and a high excited
falsetto. "He wouldn't have left this behind. No! I knowed it from the
first. He's just outside a bit, foraging for wood and water. No, sir!
Coming along here I said to Union Mills--didn't I?--'Bet your life the
Old Man's not far off, even if he ain't in the cabin.' Why, the moment
I stepped foot"--
"And I said coming along," interrupted Union Mills, with equally
reviving mendacity, 'Like as not he's hangin' round yer and lyin' low
just to give us a surprise.' He! ho!"
"He's gone for good, and he left that rifle here on purpose," said the
Left Bower in a low voice, taking the weapon almost tenderly in his
hands.
"Drop it, then!" said the Right Bower. The voice was that of his
brother, but suddenly changed with passion. The two other partners drew
back in alarm.
"I'll not leave it here for the first comer," said the Left Bower,
calmly, "because we've been fools and he too. It's too good a weapon
for that."
"Drop it, I say!" said the Right Bower, with a savage stride towards
him.
The younger brother brought the rifle to a half charge with a white
face but a steady eye.
"Stop where you are!" he said collectedly. "Don't row with _me_,
because you haven't either the grit to stick to your ideas or the heart
to confess them wrong. We've followed your lead, and--here we are! The
camp's broken up--the Old Man's gone--and we're going. And as for the
d----d rifle"--
"Drop it, do you hear!" shouted the Right Bower, clinging to that one
idea with the blind pertinacity of rage and a losing cause. "Drop it!"
The Left Bower drew back, but his brother had seized the barrel with
both hands. There was a momentary struggle, a flash through the
half-lighted cabin, and a shattering report. The two men fell back from
each other; the rifle dropped on the floor between them.
The whole thing was over so quickly that the other two partners had not
had time to obey their common impulse to separate them, and
consequently even now could scarcely understand what had passed. It was
over so quickly that the two actors themselves walked back to their
places, scarcely realizing their own act.
A dead silence followed. The Judge and Union Mills looked at each other
in dazed astonishment, and then nervously set about their former
habits, apparently in that fatuous belief common to such natures, that
they were ignoring a painful situation. The Judge drew the barrel
towards him, picked up the cards, and began mechanically to "make a
patience," on which Union Mills gazed with ostentatious interest, but
with eyes furtively conscious of the rigid figure of the Right Bower by
the chimney and the abstracted face of the Left Bower at the door. Ten
minutes had passed in this occupation, the Judge and Union Mills
conversing in the furtive whispers of children unavoidably but
fascinatedly present at a family quarrel, when a light step was heard
upon the crackling brushwood outside, and the bright panting face of
the Old Man appeared upon the threshold. There was a shout of joy; in
another moment he was half-buried in the bosom of the Right Bower's
shirt, half-dragged into the lap of the Judge, upsetting the barrel,
and completely encompassed by the Left Bower and Union Mills. With the
enthusiastic utterance of his name the spell was broken.
Happily unconscious of the previous excitement that had provoked this
spontaneous unanimity of greeting, the Old Man, equally relieved, at
once broke into a feverish announcement of his discovery. He painted
the details with, I fear, a slight exaggeration of coloring, due partly
to his own excitement, and partly to justify their own. But he was
strangely conscious that these bankrupt men appeared less elated with
their personal interest in their stroke of fortune than with his own
success. "I told you he'd do it," said the Judge, with a reckless
unscrupulousness of the statement that carried everybody with it; "look
at him! the game little pup." "Oh, no! he ain't the right breed, is
he?" echoed Union Mills with arch irony, while the Right and Left
Bower, grasping either hand, pressed a proud but silent greeting that
was half new to him, but wholly delicious. It was not without
difficulty that he could at last prevail upon them to return with him
to the scene of his discovery, or even then restrain them from
attempting to carry him thither on their shoulders on the plea of his
previous prolonged exertions. Once only there was a momentary
embarrassment. "Then you fired that shot to bring me back?" said the
Old Man, gratefully. In the awkward silence that followed, the hands of
the two brothers sought and grasped each other, penitently. "Yes,"
interposed the Judge with delicate tact, "ye see the Right and Left
Bower almost quarreled to see which should be the first to fire for ye.
I disremember which did"--"I never touched the trigger," said the Left
Bower, hastily. With a hurried backward kick, the Judge resumed, "It
went off sorter spontaneous."
The difference in the sentiment of the procession that once more issued
from the Lone Star cabin did not fail to show itself in each individual
partner according to his temperament. The subtle tact of Union Mills,
however, in expressing an awakened respect for their fortunate partner
by addressing him, as if unconsciously, as "Mr. Ford" was at first
discomposing, but even this was forgotten in their breathless
excitement as they neared the base of the mountain. When they had
crossed the creek the Right Bower stopped reflectively.
"You say you heard the slide come down before you left the cabin?" he
said, turning to the Old Man.
"Yes; but I did not know then what it was. It was about an hour and a
half after you left," was the reply.
"Then look here, boys," continued the Right Bower with superstitious
exultation; "it was the _slide_ that tumbled into the creek, overflowed
it, and helped _us_ clear out the race!"
It seemed so clear that Providence had taken the partners of the Lone
Star directly in hand that they faced the toilsome ascent of the
mountain with the assurance of conquerors. They paused only on the
summit to allow the Old Man to lead the way to the slope that held
their treasure. He advanced cautiously to the edge of the crumbling
cliff, stopped, looked bewildered, advanced again, and then remained
white and immovable. In an instant the Right Bower was at his side.
"Is anything the matter? Don't--don't look so, Old Man, for God's
sake!"
The Old Man pointed to the dull, smooth, black side of the mountain,
without a crag, break, or protuberance, and said with ashen lips:
"It's gone!"
* * * * *
And it was gone! A _second_ slide had taken place, stripping the flank
of the mountain, and burying the treasure and the weak implement that
had marked its side deep under a chaos of rock and débris at its base.
"Thank God!" The blank faces of his companions turned quickly to the
Right Bower. "Thank God!" he repeated, with his arm round the neck of
the Old Man.
"Had he stayed behind he would have been buried too." He paused, and,
pointing solemnly to the depths below, said, "And thank God for showing
us where we may yet labor for it in hope and patience like honest men."
The men silently bowed their heads and slowly descended the mountain.
But when they had reached the plain, one of them called out to the
others to watch a star that seemed to be rising and moving towards them
over the hushed and sleeping valley.
"It's only the stage-coach, boys," said the Left Bower, smiling; "the
coach that was to take us away."
In the security of their new-found fraternity they resolved to wait and
see it pass. As it swept by with flash of light, beat of hoofs, and
jingle of harness, the only real presence in the dreamy landscape, the
driver shouted a hoarse greeting to the phantom partners, audible only
to the Judge, who was nearest the vehicle.
"Did you hear--_did_ you hear what he said, boys?" he gasped, turning
to his companions. "No? Shake hands all round, boys! God bless you all,
boys! To think we didn't know it all this while!"
"Know what?"
"Merry Christmas!"
A SHIP OF '49.
It had rained so persistently in San Francisco during the first week of
January, 1854, that a certain quagmire in the roadway of Long Wharf had
become impassable, and a plank was thrown over its dangerous depth.
Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good
authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly lost
his portmanteau, and was fain to dispose of his entire interest in it
for the sum of two dollars and fifty cents to a speculative stranger on
the wharf. As the stranger's search was rewarded afterwards only by the
discovery of the body of a casual Chinaman, who had evidently
endeavored wickedly to anticipate him, a feeling of commercial
insecurity was added to the other eccentricities of the locality.
The plank led to the door of a building that was a marvel even in the
chaotic frontier architecture of the street. The houses on either
side--irregular frames of wood or corrugated iron--bore evidence of
having been quickly thrown together, to meet the requirements of the
goods and passengers who were once disembarked on what was the muddy
beach of the infant city. But the building in question exhibited a
certain elaboration of form and design utterly inconsistent with this
idea. The structure obtruded a bowed front to the street, with a
curving line of small windows, surmounted by elaborate carvings and
scroll work of vines and leaves, while below, in faded gilt letters,
appeared the legend "Pontiac--Marseilles." The effect of this
incongruity was startling.
It is related that an inebriated miner, impeded by mud and drink before
its door, was found gazing at its remarkable façade with an expression
of the deepest despondency. "I hev lived a free life, pardner," he
explained thickly to the Samaritan who succored him, "and every time
since I've been on this six weeks' jamboree might have kalkilated it
would come to this. Snakes I've seen afore now, and rats I'm not
unfamiliar with, but when it comes to the starn of a ship risin' up out
of the street, I reckon it's time to pass in my checks."
"It _is_ a ship, you blasted old soaker," said the Samaritan curtly.
It was indeed a ship. A ship run ashore and abandoned on the beach
years before by her gold-seeking crew, with the débris of her scattered
stores and cargo, overtaken by the wild growth of the strange city and
the reclamation of the muddy flat, wherein she lay hopelessly imbedded;
her retreat cut off by wharves and quays and breakwater, jostled at
first by sheds, and then impacted in a block of solid warehouses and
dwellings, her rudder, port, and counter boarded in, and now gazing
hopelessly through her cabin windows upon the busy street before her.
But still a ship despite her transformation. The faintest line of
contour yet left visible spoke of the buoyancy of another element; the
balustrade of her roof was unmistakably a taffrail. The rain slipped
from her swelling sides with a certain lingering touch of the sea; the
soil around her was still treacherous with its suggestions, and even
the wind whistled nautically over her chimney. If, in the fury of some
southwesterly gale, she had one night slipped her strange moorings and
left a shining track through the lower town to the distant sea, no one
would have been surprised.
Least of all, perhaps, her present owner and possessor, Mr. Abner Nott.
For by the irony of circumstances, Mr. Nott was a Far Western farmer
who had never seen a ship before, nor a larger stream of water than a
tributary of the Missouri River. In a spirit, half of fascination, half
of speculation, he had bought her at the time of her abandonment, and
had since mortgaged his ranch at Petaluma with his live stock, to
defray the expenses of filling in the land where she stood, and the
improvements of the vicinity. He had transferred his household goods
and his only daughter to her cabin, and had divided the space "between
decks" and her hold into lodging-rooms, and lofts for the storage of
goods. It could hardly be said that the investment had been profitable.
His tenants vaguely recognized that his occupancy was a sentimental
rather than a commercial speculation, and often generously lent
themselves to the illusion by not paying their rent. Others treated
their own tenancy as a joke,--a quaint recreation born of the childlike
familiarity of frontier intercourse. A few had left; carelessly
abandoning their unsalable goods to their landlord, with great
cheerfulness and a sense of favor. Occasionally Mr. Abner Nott, in a
practical relapse, raged against the derelicts, and talked of
dispossessing them, or even dismantling his tenement, but he was easily
placated by a compliment to the "dear old ship," or an effort made by
some tenant to idealize his apartment. A photographer who had
ingeniously utilized the forecastle for a gallery (accessible from the
bows in the next street), paid no further tribute than a portrait of
the pretty face of Rosey Nott. The superstitious reverence in which
Abner Nott held his monstrous fancy was naturally enhanced by his
purely bucolic exaggeration of its real functions and its native
element. "This yer keel has sailed, and sailed, and sailed," he would
explain with some incongruity of illustration, "in a bee line, makin'
tracks for days runnin'. I reckon more storms and blizzards hez tackled
her than you ken shake a stick at. She's stampeded whales afore now,
and sloshed round with pirates and freebooters in and outer the Spanish
Main, and across lots from Marcelleys where she was rared. And yer she
sits peaceful-like just ez if she'd never been outer a pertater patch,
and hadn't ploughed the sea with fo'sails and studdin' sails and them
things cavortin' round her masts."
Abner Nott's enthusiasm was shared by his daughter, but with more
imagination, and an intelligence stimulated by the scant literature of
her father's emigrant wagon and the few books found on the cabin
shelves. But to her the strange shell she inhabited suggested more of
the great world than the rude, chaotic civilization she saw from the
cabin windows or met in the persons of her father's lodgers. Shut up
for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the
enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theater of her active
maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it. She had
translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical
hieroglyphics after her own fashion, and possessed herself of its
secrets. She had in fancy made voyages in it to foreign lands, had
heard the accents of a softer tongue on its decks, and on summer
nights, from the roof of the quarter-deck, had seen mellower
constellations take the place of the hard metallic glitter of the
Californian skies. Sometimes, in her isolation, the long, cylindrical
vault she inhabited seemed, like some vast sea-shell, to become musical
with the murmurings of the distant sea. So completely had it taken the
place of the usual instincts of feminine youth that she had forgotten
she was pretty, or that her dresses were old in fashion and scant in
quantity. After the first surprise of admiration her father's lodgers
ceased to follow the abstracted nymph except with their eyes,--partly
respecting her spiritual shyness, partly respecting the jealous
supervision of the paternal Nott. She seldom penetrated the crowded
center of the growing city; her rare excursions were confined to the
old ranch at Petaluma, whence she brought flowers and plants, and even
extemporized a hanging-garden on the quarter-deck.
It was still raining, and the wind, which had increased to a gale, was
dashing the drops against the slanting cabin windows with a sound like
spray when Mr. Abner Nott sat before a table seriously engaged with his
accounts. For it was "steamer night,"--as that momentous day of
reckoning before the sailing of the regular mail steamer was briefly
known to commercial San Francisco,--and Mr. Nott was subject at such
times to severely practical relapses. A swinging light seemed to bring
into greater relief that peculiar encased casket-like security of the
low-timbered, tightly-fitting apartment, with its toy-like utilities of
space, and made the pretty oval face of Rosey Nott appear a
characteristic ornament. The sliding door of the cabin communicated
with the main deck, now roofed in and partitioned off so as to form a
small passage that led to the open starboard gangway, where a narrow,
enclosed staircase built on the ship's side took the place of the
ship's ladder under her counter, and opened in the street.
A dash of rain against the window caused Rosey to lift her eyes from
her book.
"It's much nicer here than at the ranch, father," she said coaxingly,
"even leaving alone its being a beautiful ship instead of a shanty; the
wind don't whistle through the cracks and blow out the candle when
you're reading, nor the rain spoil your things hung up against the
wall. And you look more like a gentleman sitting in his own--ship--you
know, looking over his bills and getting ready to give his orders."
Vague and general as Miss Rosey's compliment was, it had its full
effect upon her father, who was at times dimly conscious of his
hopeless rusticity and its incongruity with his surroundings. "Yes," he
said awkwardly, with a slight relaxation of his aggressive attitude;
"yes, in course it's more bang-up style, but it don't pay--Rosey--it
don't pay. Yer's the Pontiac that oughter be bringin' in, ez rents go,
at least three hundred a month, don't make her taxes. I bin thinkin'
seriously of sellin' her."
As Rosey knew her father had experienced this serious contemplation on
the first of every month for the last two years, and cheerfully ignored
it the next day, she only said, "I'm sure the vacant rooms and lofts
are all rented, father."
"That's it," returned Mr. Nott thoughtfully, plucking at his bushy
whiskers with his fingers and thumb as if he were removing dead and
sapless incumbrances in their growth, "that's just what it is--them's
ez in it themselves don't pay, and them ez haz left their goods--the
goods don't pay. The feller ez stored them iron sugar kettles in the
forehold, after trying to get me to make another advance on 'em, sez he
believes he'll have to sacrifice 'em to me after all, and only begs I'd
give him a chance of buying back the half of 'em ten years from now, at
double what I advanced him. The chap that left them five hundred cases
of hair dye 'tween decks and then skipped out to Sacramento, met me the
other day in the street and advised me to use a bottle ez an
advertisement, or try it on the starn of the Pontiac for fireproof
paint. That foolishness ez all he's good for. And yet thar might be
suthin' in the paint, if a feller had nigger luck. Ther's that New York
chap ez bought up them damaged boxes of plug terbakker for fifty
dollars a thousand, and sold 'em for foundations for that new building
in Sansome Street at a thousand clear profit. It's all luck, Rosey."
The girl's eyes had wandered again to the pages of her book. Perhaps
she was already familiar with the text of her father's monologue. But
recognizing an additional querulousness in his voice, she laid the book
aside and patiently folded her hands in her lap.
"That's right--for I've suthin' to tell ye. The fact is Sleight wants
to buy the Pontiac out and out just ez she stands with the two fifty
vara lots she stands on."
"Sleight wants to buy her? Sleight?" echoed Rosey incredulously.
"You bet! Sleight--the big financier, the smartest man in 'Frisco."
"What does he want to buy her for?" asked Rosey, knitting her pretty
brows.
The apparently simple question suddenly puzzled Mr. Nott. He glanced
feebly at his daughter's face, and frowned in vacant irritation.
"That's so," he said, drawing a long breath; "there's suthin' in that."
"What did he _say_?" continued the young girl, impatiently.
"Not much. 'You've got the Pontiac, Nott,' sez he. 'You bet!' sez I.
'What'll you take for her and the lot she stands on?' sez he, short and
sharp. Some fellers, Rosey," said Nott, with a cunning smile, "would
hev blurted out a big figger and been cotched. That ain't my style. I
just looked at him. 'I'll wait fur your figgers until next steamer
day,' sez he, and off he goes like a shot. He's awfully sharp, Rosey."
"But if he is sharp, father, and he really wants to buy the ship,"
returned Rosey, thoughtfully, "it's only because he knows it's valuable
property, and not because he likes it as we do. He can't take that
value away even if we don't sell it to him, and all the while we have
the comfort of the dear old Pontiac, don't you see?"
This exhaustive commercial' reasoning was so sympathetic to Mr. Nott's
instincts that he accepted it as conclusive. He, however, deemed it
wise to still preserve his practical attitude. "But that don't make it
pay by the month, Rosey. Suthin' must be done. I'm thinking I'll clean
out that photographer."
"Not just after he's taken such a pretty view of the cabin front of the
Pontiac from the street, father! No! He's going to give us a copy, and
put the other in a shop window in Montgomery Street."
"That's so," said Mr. Nott, musingly; "it's no slouch of an
advertisement. 'The Pontiac,' the property of A. Nott, Esq., of St. Jo,
Missouri. Send it on to your aunt Phoebe; sorter make the old folks
open their eyes--oh? Well, seem' he's been to some expense fittin' up
an entrance from the other street, we'll let him slide. But as to that
d----d old Frenchman Ferrers, in the next loft, with his stuck-up airs
and high-falutin style, we must get quit of him; he's regularly gouged
me in that ere horsehair spekilation."
"How can you say that, father!" said Rosey, with a slight increase of
color. "It was your own offer. You know those bales of curled horsehair
were left behind by the late tenant to pay his rent. When Mr. De
Ferrières rented the room afterwards, you told him you'd throw them in
in the place of repairs and furniture. It was your own offer."
"Yes, but I didn't reckon ther'd ever be a big price per pound paid for
the darned stuff for sofys and cushions and sich."
"How do you know _he_ knew it, father?" responded Rosey.
"Then why did he look so silly at first, and then put on airs when I
joked him about it, eh?"
"Perhaps he didn't understand your joking, father. He's a foreigner,
and shy and proud, and--not like the others. I don't think he knew what
you meant then, any more than he believed he was making a bargain
before. He may be poor, but I think he's been--a--a--gentleman."
The young girl's animation penetrated even Mr. Nott's slow
comprehension. Her novel opposition, and even the prettiness it
enhanced, gave him a dull premonition of pain. His small round eyes
became abstracted, his mouth remained partly open, even his fresh color
slightly paled.
"You seem to have been takin' stock of this yer man, Rosey," he said,
with a faint attempt at archness; "if he warn't ez old ez a crow, for
all his young feathers, I'd think he was makin' up to you."
But the passing glow had faded from her young cheeks, and her eyes
wandered again to her book. "He pays his rent regularly every steamer
night," she said, quietly, as if dismissing an exhausted subject, "and
he'll be here in a moment, I dare say." She took up her book, and
leaning her head on her hand, once more became absorbed in its pages.
An uneasy silence followed. The rain beat against the windows, the
ticking of a clock became audible, but still Mr. Nott sat with vacant
eyes fixed on his daughter's face, and the constrained smile on his
lips. He was conscious that he had never seen her look so pretty
before, yet he could not tell why this was no longer an unalloyed
satisfaction. Not but that he had always accepted the admiration of
others for her as a matter of course, but for the first time he became
conscious that she not only had an interest in others, but apparently a
superior knowledge of them. How did she know these things about this
man, and why had she only now accidentally spoken of them? _He_ would
have done so. All this passed so vaguely through his unreflective mind,
that he was unable to retain any decided impression, but the
far-reaching one that his lodger had obtained some occult influence
over her through the exhibition of his baleful skill in the horsehair
speculation. "Them tricks is likely to take a young girl's fancy. I
must look arter her," he said to himself softly.
A slow regular step in the gangway interrupted his paternal
reflections. Hastily buttoning across his chest the pea-jacket which he
usually wore at home as a single concession to his nautical
surroundings, he drew himself up with something of the assumption of a
shipmaster, despite certain bucolic suggestions of his boots and legs.
The footsteps approached nearer, and a tall figure suddenly stood in
the doorway.
It was a figure so extraordinary that even in the strange masquerade of
that early civilization it was remarkable; a figure with whom father
and daughter were already familiar without abatement of wonder--the
figure of a rejuvenated old man, padded, powdered, dyed, and painted to
the verge of caricature, but without a single suggestion of
ludicrousness or humor. A face so artificial that it seemed almost a
mask, but, like a mask, more pathetic than amusing. He was dressed in
the extreme of fashion of a dozen years before; his pearl--gray
trousers strapped tightly over his varnished boots, his voluminous
satin cravat and high collar embraced his rouged cheeks and dyed
whiskers, his closely-buttoned frock coat clinging to a waist that
seemed accented by stays.
He advanced two steps into the cabin with an upright precision of
motion that might have hid the infirmities of age, and said
deliberately with a foreign accent:
"You-r-r ac-coumpt?"
In the actual presence of the apparition Mr. Nott's dignified
resistance wavered. But glancing uneasily at his daughter and seeing
her calm eyes fixed on the speaker without embarrassment, he folded his
arms stiffly, and with a lofty simulation of examining the ceiling,
said:
"Ahem! Rosa! The gentleman's account."
It was an infelicitous action. For the stranger, who evidently had not
noticed the presence of the young girl before, started, took a step
quickly forward, bent stiffly but profoundly over the little hand that
held the account, raised it to his lips, and with "a thousand pardons,
mademoiselle," laid a small canvas bag containing the rent before the
disorganized Mr. Nott and stiffly vanished.
The night was a troubled one to the simple-minded proprietor of the
good ship Pontiac. Unable to voice his uneasiness by further
discussion, but feeling that his late discomposing interview with his
lodger demanded some marked protest, he absented himself on the plea of
business during the rest of the evening, happily to his daughter's
utter obliviousness of the reason. Lights were burning brilliantly in
counting-rooms and offices, the feverish life of the mercantile city
was at its height. With a vague idea of entering into immediate
negotiations with Mr. Sleight for the sale of the ship--as a direct way
out of his present perplexity, he bent his steps towards the
financier's office, but paused and turned back before reaching the
door. He made his way to the wharf and gazed abstractedly at the lights
reflected in the dark, tremulous, jelly-like water. But wherever he
went he was accompanied by the absurd figure of his lodger--a figure he
had hitherto laughed at or half pitied, but which now, to his
bewildered comprehension, seemed to have a fateful significance. Here a
new idea seized him, and he hurried back to the ship, slackening his
pace only when he arrived at his own doorway. Here he paused a moment
and slowly ascended the staircase. When he reached the passage he
coughed slightly and paused again. Then he pushed open the door of the
darkened cabin and called softly:
"Rosey!"
"What is it, father?" said Rosey's voice from the little state-room on
the right--Rosey's own bower.
"Nothing!" said Mr. Nott, with an affectation of languid calmness; "I
only wanted to know if you was comfortable. It's an awful busy night in
town."
"Yes, father."
"I reckon thar's tons o' gold goin' to the States tomorrow."
"Yes, father."
"Pretty comfortable, eh?"
"Yes, father."
"Well, I'll browse round a spell, and turn in myself soon."
"Yes, father."
Mr. Nott took down a hanging lantern, lighted it, and passed out into
the gangway. Another lamp hung from the companion hatch to light the
tenants to the lower deck, whence he descended. This deck was divided
fore and aft by a partitioned passage,--the lofts or apartments being
lighted from the ports, and one or two by a door cut through the ship's
side communicating with an alley on either side. This was the case with
the loft occupied by Mr. Nott's strange lodger, which, besides a door
in the passage, had this independent communication with the alley. Nott
had never known him to make use of the latter door; on the contrary, it
was his regular habit to issue from his apartment at three o'clock
every afternoon, dressed as he has been described, stride deliberately
through the passage to the upper deck and thence into the street, where
his strange figure was a feature of the principal promenade for two or
three hours, returning as regularly at eight o'clock to the ship and
the seclusion of his loft. Mr. Nott paused before the door, under the
pretense of throwing the light before him into the shadows of the
forecastle: all was silent within. He was turning back when he was
impressed by the regular recurrence of a peculiar rustling sound which
he had at first referred to the rubbing of the wires of the swinging
lantern against his clothing. He set down the light and listened; the
sound was evidently on the other side of the partition; the sound of
some prolonged, rustling, scraping movement, with regular intervals.
Was it due to another of Mr. Nott's unprofitable tenants--the rats? No.
A bright idea flashed upon Mr. Nott's troubled mind. It was De
Ferrières snoring! He smiled grimly. "Wonder if Rosey'd call him a
gentleman if she heard that," he chuckled to himself as he slowly made
his way back to the cabin and the small state-room opposite to his
daughter's. During the rest of the night he dreamed of being compelled
to give Rosey in marriage to his lodger, who added insult to the
outrage by snoring audibly through the marriage service.
Meantime, in her cradle-like nest in her nautical bower, Miss Rosey
slumbered as lightly. Waking from a vivid dream of Venice--a child's
Venice--seen from the swelling deck of the proudly-riding Pontiac, she
was so impressed as to rise and cross on tiptoe to the little slanting
port-hole. Morning was already dawning over the flat, straggling city,
but from every counting-house and magazine the votive tapers of the
feverish worshipers of trade and mammon were still flaring fiercely.
II.
The day following "steamer night" was usually stale and flat at San
Francisco. The reaction from the feverish exaltation of the previous
twenty-four hours was seen in the listless faces and lounging feet of
promenaders, and was notable in the deserted offices and warehouses
still redolent of last night's gas, and strewn with the dead ashes of
last night's fires. There was a brief pause before the busy life which
ran its course from "steamer day" to steamer day was once more taken
up. In that interval a few anxious speculators and investors breathed
freely, some critical situation was relieved, or some impending
catastrophe momentarily averted. In particular, a singular stroke of
good fortune that morning befell Mr. Nott. He not only secured a new
tenant, but, as he sagaciously believed, introduced into the Pontiac a
counteracting influence to the subtle fascinations of De Ferrières.
The new tenant apparently possessed a combination of business
shrewdness and brusque frankness that strongly impressed his landlord.
"You see, Rosey," said Nott, complacently describing the interview to
his daughter, "when I sorter intimated in a keerless kind o' way that
sugar kettles and hair dye was about played out ez securities, he just
planked down the money for two months in advance. 'There,' sez he,
'that's _your_ security--now where's _mine_?' 'I reckon I don't hitch
on, pardner,' sez I; 'security what for?' ''Spose you sell the ship?'
sez he, 'afore the two months is up. I've heard that old Sleight wants
to buy her.' 'Then you gets back your money,' sez I. 'And lose my
room,' sez he; 'not much, old man. You sign a paper that whoever buys
the ship inside o' two months hez to buy _me_ ez a tenant with it;
that's on the square.' So I sign the paper. It was mighty cute in the
young feller, wasn't it?" he said, scanning his daughter's pretty
puzzled face a little anxiously; "and don't you see, ez I ain't goin'
to sell the Pontiac, it's just about ez cute in me, eh? He's a
contractor somewhere around yer, and wants to be near his work. So he
takes the room next to the Frenchman, that that ship-captain quit for
the mines, and succeeds naterally to his chest and things. He's mighty
peart-looking, that young feller, Rosey--long black mustaches, all his
own color, Rosey--and he's a regular high-stepper, you bet. I reckon
he's not only been a gentleman, but ez _now_. Some o' them contractors
are very high-toned!"
"I don't think we have any right to give him the captain's chest,
father," said Rosey; "there may be some private things in it. There
were some letters and photographs in the hair-dye man's trunk that you
gave the photographer."
"That's just it, Rosey," returned Abner Nott with sublime
unconsciousness, "photographs and love letters you can't sell for cash,
and I don't mind givin' 'em away, if they kin make a feller-creature
happy."
"But, father, have we the _right_ to give 'em away?"
"They're collateral security, Rosey." said her father grimly.
"Co-la-te-ral," he continued, emphasizing each syllable by tapping the
fist of one hand in the open palm of the other. "Co-la-te-ral is the
word the big business sharps yer about call 'em. You can't get round
that." He paused a moment, and then, as a new idea seemed to be
painfully borne in his round eyes, continued cautiously: "Was that the
reason why you wouldn't touch any of them dresses from the trunks of
that opery gal ez skedaddled for Sacramento? And yet them trunks I
regularly bought at auction--Rosey--at auction, on spec--and they
didn't realize the cost of drayage."
A slight color mounted to Rosey's face. "No," she said, hastily, "not
that." Hesitating a moment, she then drew softly to his side, and,
placing her arms around his neck, turned his broad, foolish face
towards her own. "Father," she began, "when mother died, would _you_
have liked anybody to take her trunks and paw round her things and wear
them?"
"When your mother died, just this side o' Sweetwater, Rosey," said Mr.
Nott, with beaming unconsciousness, "she had n't any trunks. I reckon
she had n't even an extra gown hanging up in the wagin, 'cept the
petticoat ez she had wrapped around yer. It was about ez much ez we
could do to skirmish round with Injins, alkali, and cold, and we sorter
forgot to dress for dinner. She never thought, Rosey, that you and me
would live to be inhabitin' a paliss of a real ship. Ef she had she
would have died a proud woman."
He turned his small, loving, boar-like eyes upon her as a
preternaturally innocent and trusting companion of Ulysses might have
regarded the transforming Circe. Rosey turned away with the faintest
sigh. The habitual look of abstraction returned to her eyes as if she
had once more taken refuge in her own ideal world. Unfortunately the
change did not escape either the sensitive observation or the fatuous
misconception of the sagacious parent. "Ye'll be mountin' a few
furbelows and fixins, Rosey, I reckon, ez only natural. Mebbee ye'll
have to prink up a little now that we've got a gentleman contractor in
the ship. I'll see what I kin pick up in Montgomery Street." And indeed
he succeeded a few hours later in accomplishing with equal infelicity
his generous design. When she returned from her household tasks she
found on her berth a purple velvet bonnet of extraordinary make, and a
pair of white satin slippers. "They'll do for a start-off, Rosey," he
explained, "and I got 'em at my figgers."
"But I go out so seldom, father; and a bonnet"--
"That's so," interrupted Mr. Nott, complacently, "it might be jest ez
well for a young gal like yer to appear ez if she _did_ go out, or
would go out if she wanted to. So you kin be wearin' that ar headstall
kinder like this evening when the contractor's here, ez if you'd jest
come in from _a pasear_."
Miss Rosey did not however immediately avail herself of her father's
purchase, but contented herself with the usual scarlet ribbon that like
a snood confined her brown hair, when she returned to her tasks. The
space between the galley and the bulwarks had been her favorite resort
in summer when not actually engaged in household work. It was now
lightly roofed over with boards and tarpaulin against the winter rain,
but still afforded her a veranda-like space before the galley door,
where she could read or sew, looking over the bow of the Pontiac to the
tossing bay or the farther range of the Contra Costa hills.
Hither Miss Rosey brought the purple prodigy, partly to please her
father, partly with a view of subjecting it to violent radical changes.
But after trying it on before the tiny mirror in the galley once or
twice, her thoughts wandered away, and she fell into one of her
habitual reveries seated on a little stool before the galley door.
She was aroused from it by the slight shaking and rattling of the doors
of a small hatch on the deck, not a dozen yards from where she sat. It
had been evidently fastened from below during the wet weather, but as
she gazed, the fastenings were removed, the doors were suddenly lifted,
and the head and shoulders of a young man emerged from the deck. Partly
from her father's description, and partly from the impossibility of its
being anybody else, she at once conceived it to be the new lodger. She
had time to note that he was young and good-looking, graver perhaps
than became his sudden pantomimic appearance, but before she could
observe him closely, he had turned, closed the hatch with a certain
familiar dexterity, and walked slowly towards the bows. Even in her
slight bewilderment she observed that his step upon the deck seemed
different to her father's or the photographer's, and that he laid his
hand on various objects with a half-caressing ease and habit. Presently
he paused and turned back, and glancing at the galley door for the
first time encountered her wondering eyes.
It seemed so evident that she had been a curious spectator of his
abrupt entrance on deck that he was at first disconcerted and confused.
But after a second glance at her he appeared to resume his composure,
and advanced a little defiantly towards the galley.
"I suppose I frightened you, popping up the fore hatch just now?"
"The what?" asked Rosey.
"The fore hatch," he repeated impatiently, indicating it with a
gesture.
"And that's the fore hatch?" she said abstractedly. "You seem to know
ships."
"Yes--a little," he said quietly. "I was below, and unfastened the
hatch to come up the quickest way and take a look round. I've just
hired a room here," he added explanatorily.
"I thought so," said Rosey simply; "you're the contractor?"
"The contractor!--oh, yes! You seem to know it all."
"Father's told me."
"Oh, he's your father--Nott? Certainly. I see now," he continued,
looking at her with a half repressed smile. "Certainly, Miss Nott, good
morning," he half added and walked towards the companion-way. Something
in the direction of his eyes as he turned away made Rosey lift her
hands to her head. She had forgotten to remove her father's baleful
gift.
She snatched it off and ran quickly to the companion-way.
"Sir!" she called.
The young man turned half-way down the steps and looked up. There was a
faint color in her cheeks, and her pretty brown hair was slightly
disheveled from the hasty removal of the bonnet.
"Father's very particular about strangers being on this deck," she said
a little sharply.
"Oh--ah--I'm sorry I intruded."
"I--I--thought I'd tell you," said Rosey, frightened by her boldness
into a feeble anti-climax.
"Thank you."
She came back slowly to the galley and picked up the unfortunate bonnet
with a slight sense of remorse. Why should she feel angry with her poor
father's unhappy offering? And what business had this strange young man
to use the ship so familiarly? Yet she was vaguely conscious that she
and her father, with all their love and their domestic experience of
it, lacked a certain instinctive ease in its possession that the half
indifferent stranger had shown on first treading its deck. She walked
to the hatchway and examined it with a new interest. Succeeding in
lifting the hatch, she gazed at the lower deck. As she already knew the
ladder had long since been removed to make room for one of the
partitions, the only way the stranger could have reached it was by
leaping to one of the rings. To make sure of this she let herself down
holding on to the rings, and dropped a couple of feet to the deck
below. She was in the narrow passage her father had penetrated the
previous night. Before her was the door leading to De Ferrifères' loft,
always locked. It was silent within; it was the hour when the old
Frenchman made his habitual promenade in the city. But the light from
the newly-opened hatch allowed her to see more of the mysterious
recesses of the forward bulkhead than she had known before, and she was
startled by observing another yawning hatchway at her feet from which
the closely-fitting door had been lifted, and which the new lodger had
evidently forgotten to close again. The young girl stooped down and
peered cautiously into the black abyss. Nothing was to be seen, nothing
heard but the distant gurgle and click of water in some remoter depth.
She replaced the hatch and returned by way of the passage to the cabin.
When her father came home that night she briefly recounted the
interview with the new lodger, and her discovery of his curiosity. She
did this with a possible increase of her usual shyness and abstraction,
and apparently more as a duty than a colloquial recreation. But it
pleased Mr. Nott also to give it more than his usual misconception.
"Looking round the ship, was he--eh, Rosey?" he said with infinite
archness. "In course, kinder sweepin' round the galley, and offerin' to
fetch you wood and water, eh?" Even when the young girl had picked up
her book with the usual faint smile of affectionate tolerance, and then
drifted away in its pages, Mr. Nott chuckled audibly. "I reckon old
Frenchy didn't come by when the young one was bedevlin' you there."
"What, father?" said Rosey, lifting her abstracted eyes to his face.
At the moment it seemed impossible that any human intelligence could
have suspected deceit or duplicity in Rosey's clear gaze. But Mr.
Nott's intelligence was superhuman. "I was sayin' that Mr. Ferrières
didn't happen in while the young feller was there--eh?"
"No, father," answered Rosey, with an effort to follow him out of the
pages of her book. "Why?"
But Mr. Nott did not reply. Later in the evening he awkwardly waylaid
the new lodger before the cabin-door as that gentleman would have
passed on to his room.
"I'm afraid," said the young man, glancing at Rosey, "that I intruded
upon your daughter to-day. I was a little curious to see the old ship,
and I didn't know what part of it was private."
"There ain't no private part to this yer ship--that ez, 'cepting the
rooms and lofts," said Mr. Nott, authoritatively. Then, subjecting the
anxious look of his daughter to his usual faculty for misconception, he
added, "Thar ain't no place whar you haven't as much right to go ez any
other man; thar ain't any man, furriner or Amerykan, young or old, dyed
or undyed, ez hev got any better rights. You hear me, young fellow. Mr.
Renshaw--my darter. My darter--Mr. Renshaw. Rosey, give the gentleman a
chair. She's only jest come in from a promeynade, and hez jest taken
off her bonnet," he added, with an arch look at Rosey and a hurried
look around the cabin, as if he hoped to see the missing gift visible
to the general eye. "So take a seat a minit, won't ye?"
But Mr. Renshaw, after an observant glance at the young girl's
abstracted face, brusquely excused himself. "I've got a letter to
write," he said, with a half bow to Rosey. "Good night."
He crossed the passage to the room that had been assigned to him, and
closing the door gave way to some irritability of temper in his efforts
to light the lamp and adjust his writing materials. For his excuse to
Mr. Nott was more truthful than most polite pretexts. He had, indeed, a
letter to write, and one that, being yet young in duplicity, the near
presence of his host rendered difficult. For it ran as follows:--
DEAR SLEIGHT: As I found I couldn't get a chance to make any
examination of the ship except as occasion offered, I just went in to
rent lodgings in her from the God-forsaken old ass who owns her, and
here I am a tenant for two months. I contracted for that time in case
the old fool should sell out to some one else before. Except that she's
cut up a little between decks by the partitions for lofts that that
Pike County idiot has put into her, she looks but little changed, and
her _fore-hold_, as far as I can judge, is intact. It seems that Nott
bought her just as she stands, with her cargo half out, but he wasn't
here when she broke cargo. If anybody else had bought her but this
cursed Missourian, who hasn't got the hayseed out of his hair, I might
have found out something from him, and saved myself this kind of
fooling, which isn't in my line. If I could get possession of a loft on
the main deck, well forward, just over the fore-hold, I could satisfy
myself in a few hours, but the loft is rented by that crazy Frenchman
who parades Montgomery Street every afternoon, and though old Pike
County wants to turn him out, I'm afraid I can't get it for a week to
come.
If anything should happen to me, just you waltz down here and corral my
things at once, for this old frontier pirate has a way of confiscating
his lodgers' trunks.
Yours, DICK.
III.
If Mr. Renshaw indulged in any further curiosity regarding the interior
of the Pontiac, he did not make his active researches manifest to
Rosey. Nor, in spite of her father's invitation, did he again approach
the galley--a fact which gave her her first vague impression in his
favor. He seemed also to avoid the various advances which Mr. Nott
appeared impelled to make, whenever they met in the passage, but did so
without seemingly avoiding _her_, and marked his half contemptuous
indifference to the elder Nott by an increase of respect to the young
girl. She would have liked to ask him something about ships, and was
sure his conversation would have been more interesting than that of old
Captain Bower, to whose cabin he had succeeded, who had once told her a
ship was the "devil's hencoop." She would have liked also to explain to
him that she was not in the habit of wearing a purple bonnet. But her
thoughts were presently engrossed by an experience which interrupted
the even tenor of her young life.
She had been, as she afterwards remembered, impressed with a nervous
restlessness one afternoon, which made it impossible for her to perform
her ordinary household duties, or even to indulge her favorite
recreation of reading or castle-building. She wandered over the ship,
and, impelled by the same vague feeling of unrest, descended to the
lower deck and the forward bulkhead where she had discovered the open
hatch. It had not been again disturbed, nor was there any trace of
further exploration. A little ashamed, she knew not why, of revisiting
the scene of Mr. Renshaw's researches, she was turning back when she
noticed that the door which communicated with De Ferrières' loft was
partly open. The circumstance was so unusual that she stopped before it
in surprise. There was no sound from within; it was the hour when its
queer occupant was always absent; he must have forgotten to lock the
door, or it had been unfastened by other hands. After a moment of
hesitation she pushed it further open and stepped into the room.
By the dim light of two port-holes she could see that the floor was
strewn and piled with the contents of a broken bale of curled
horse-hair, of which a few untouched bales still remained against the
wall. A heap of morocco skins, some already cut in the form of
chair-cushion covers, and a few cushions unfinished and unstuffed, lay
in the light of the ports, and gave the apartment the appearance of a
cheap workshop. A rude instrument for combining the horse-hair, awls,
buttons, and thread, heaped on a small bench, showed that active work
had been but recently interrupted. A cheap earthenware ewer and basin
on the floor, and a pallet made of an open bale of horse-hair, on which
a ragged quilt and blanket were flung, indicated that the solitary
worker dwelt and slept beside his work.
The truth flashed upon the young girl's active brain, quickened by
seclusion and fed by solitary books. She read with keen eyes the
miserable secret of her father's strange guest in the poverty-stricken
walls, in the mute evidences of menial handicraft performed in
loneliness and privation, in this piteous adaptation of an accident to
save the conscious shame of premeditated toil. She knew now why he had
stammeringly refused to receive her father's offer to buy back the
goods he had given him; she knew now how hardly gained was the pittance
that paid his rent and supported his childish vanity and grotesque
pride. From a peg in the corner hung the familiar masquerade that hid
his poverty--the pearl-gray trousers, the black frock-coat, the tall
shining hat--in hideous contrast to the penury of his surroundings. But
if _they_ were here, where was _he_, and in what new disguise had he
escaped from his poverty? A vague uneasiness caused her to hesitate and
return to the open door. She had nearly reached it when her eye fell on
the pallet which it partly illuminated. A singular resemblance in the
ragged heap made her draw closer. The faded quilt was a dressing-gown,
and clutching its folds lay a white, wasted hand.